That's Just Wrong Friday #2

A hair removal product called Nads.  That's just wrong.

Amanda Palmer & The Young Punx - "Map of Tasmania"

Best. Name. Ever.

Detective Michelle Paxson is a newish recurring character in the third season of the mediocre spy show Burn Notice. 

What rocks my world is that the name of the actor who plays her is Moon Goodblood.

It's like an aggressively feminist name for menstruation.  What a name.

Moon Goodblood.

Someone give this woman a starring role in a movie. I want to see that on a poster in a really large font.

Hot Librarian

Just because.

source unknown

[LINK]

Graffiti Love

When I see penis graffiti I normally assume some guy is asserting his dubious masculinity.  By why, I have to wonder, was this specimen on the inside of a ladies' room toilet stall?

Assuming the artists does not actually own the equipment in question, I can only assume that they were going for shock value.  And frankly, an anatomically accurate depiction of a vagina would be way more startling.

It was, at least, a well rounded toilet stall that covered not only sexual genitalia but also the (occasionally) associated emotions.

Vanilla Blurk

I have previously rated Starbuck's Via instant coffee a solid 'Meh'. It's a pretty good, if over-priced, on-the-go coffee.

By contrast Vanilla Via is a emphatic 'Blurk!', followed by mouthwash to combat the persistent after-taste. If you use this stuff to make mixed or flavor melanges its offensive taste might be largely disguised. But if you want to just add hot water and drink, no. Just no. Don't do it.

While plain Via has an inoffensive one-note mild flavor, Vanilla Via tastes first of chemicals (a bit like dish washing soap), strange delayed sweetness and slightly burnt coffee sweepings. The after-taste is filmy and acrid. I cannot believe anyone would pay good money for this crap.

Thats Just Wrong Friday #1

Whole grain croissant. That's just wrong.

WTF Advertising

The current 'Sour Patch' advertisement strikes me is extremely weird, with extra weirdness and a dash of WTF.  You see domestic violence often occurs in a cycle of violence followed by remorse and charm (followed by more violence, etc). Ha ha. Um. What? Or is the assumption that because the victim is a young man it isn't 'real' violence and so we can find it amusing?

Retail Dog in the Manger

I generally like the blog "Not Always Right", which provides a daily dose of retail customers acting unreasonable or dumb.  But I think sometimes the assumption built into a blog can get "stuck".  Customers are stupid, right?  i am sure they are, a lot of the time. I didn't last long in customer service myself.

But the story Not The Best Display Of Human Behavior is actually about a store policy and its drone staff being stupid. Basically a customer asks to buy an old store display.  the staff and manager say she cannot ans through the old display in the dumpster rather than giving it to someone who wants it.  Then they detain the customer for "stealing" the display from the dumpster.

It; trash, people.  The store threw it out.  The customer wanted it, so she took it.  The customer was right.

Emphasising the assets

A lot of energy is devoted to fashion that displays the upper torso assets of the female to best advantage.  But in the last century fashion that does the same for the lower torso assets of the male have been neglected. 

JLS (a.k.a. Jack the Lad Swing) seems to have broken some new ground in groin-enhancing trouserwear in a recent appearance. While not going the full codpiece, JB is certainly making the most of what he has.

Ho-hum

Italian photographer Toscani decided to put out a calender that is just shots of female groins.  I think this is hilarious.  Less so because he has some pseudo-literary bullshit explanation to do with the hypocrisy of high fashion. 

"I wanted to deglamorize the classic fashion industry photos, where women totter in high heels wearing bright red lipstick... and everything is revealed apart from the genital triangle, the real heart of seduction."

Blah, blah blah. I think he should have just cut the crap and done a calender of close up split beaver shots as if to say: here you are, that's what you really want right?  And see who would own up to it.

But frankly, I think he looks like a smug bastard who is trying to pretend his beaver calendar has some kind of higher artistic purpose.

5 Weirdest Branded Fashion Products

#5 Smurfette "Girls Night Out"
I know that it is a retro classic design to make a T-shirt of 'Ladies night' or 'Girls Night Out' and put some classic female characters on it. But when you are the only female of the species it just becomes a perplexing homage to delusional narcissism.

#4 Cruella de Vil Cosmetics
Yes, I get that MAC is an edgy brand, and their are some villianesses with undeniable style. But the haggard looking potential puppy murderer just does not strike me good basis for a make-up collection

#3 Ken Bow Tie
Yes, this is an official Barbie/Matel product made in conjunction with Colette.  Don't have the classic good looks needed to truly carry off a bow tie?  no, problem!  This bow tie has them built in.




#2 Superman Bling
Superman is meant to be about down home rustic heroism, so there is immediately something a bit wrong about Superman bling.  Not only is it pretentious and expensive ($500), it is fake--made from cubic Zircon and brass tarted up with a thin coating of gold.  Tacky.  And what is with the model with gold stubble?  This whole collection is pure WTF. Maybe there was some red Kryptonite involved....

#1 Hello Kitty Cat Clothing

Hello Kitty provides an outfit that allows you to dress your cat up... as a cat (only more annoyed).  Baffling, pointless, and a difficult to explain to the paramedics.

Thank God for the 80s ;)

Everyone else in the Blogoverse has been having fun with Google Ngram.  This program tracks the relative rate at which different words are used in all of the books scanned by Google Books.  So here is one of my searches for the relative mention made of men, women, children and animals.  Only since the 1980s has it actually been 'women and children first'.... (Click figure to enlarge).

Wonder Woman Fails to Take Off

Sadly it seems that every TV network turned up their noses at the notion of a new Wonder Woman series. It does make me wonder.  Do the networks suffer from a congenital lack of imagination? Or is David E Kelley's pilot script a total dog?

Because I think a secret agent amazon for the new Millennium would kick serious ass.  But only if they resist "re-imagining" the costume too much. More sleuthing, less romance, ditch the invisible plane, keep the lasso and the star-spangled knickers.

Oh, and keep it off NBC.

Ab-solutely

Welcome to equality. Women are having stress-induced heart attacks at work, and men are trying to live up to increasingly bizarre beauty ideals.

Namely: the eight-pack.

Because the six-pack isn't unrealistic enough.

Ice Ice Cry-Baby

Vanilla Ice has recently been talking about how he broke up with Madonna (back in the day) because of her provocative book "Sex". Specifically because:

"...I was hurt to be an unwitting part of this slutty package."

Because dude has standards, right?  None of this nudity, objectification and sex appeal business for him. Not then, and not now....

Reporting from the Field, Literally.

I think television journalism has officially lost the plot when it comes to reporting from the scene.  What, after all, is the point of reporting from the scene. It seems that the television networks think it is all about immediacy.  About being there.  About action.  About pretty backdrops vaguely suggestive of action when no action is actually accessible to the camera.

But it isn't.  Reporting from the field is about context.  And recent coverage of the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and others makes it clear that this is another thing entirely.

Field reporting is about telling us information in the setting where it makes the most sense and is the most true and coherent.  Thus, if you are telling us about how the shots were fired and how people responded, it might make sense to be at the scene of the shooting.  If you are talking about community grief and compassion you might stand in front of the spontaneous tributes of flowers and notes.

But if you are talking to a doctor about a procedure performed to release pressure on a victim's brain you should probably conduct that interview in an office or hospital room.  Not out in a grassy area with a small black table more suggestive of a magic trick than an operating room--where the doctor is left patting the skull symbolic of a fallen hero as if it is a pet rabbit. When you are talking about a possibly life saving surgery the most appropriate context may, in fact, be a room.

Zing

'"The Cape" is akin to breaking into a bank and stealing the pens.'

Tim Goodman berates new TV series the Cape not for stealing from Batman, but for not stealing the good bits.

O'Reilly's Last Laugh

An employment tribunal found that when the BBC fired a female "Countryfile" presenter (one of four women fired) because of her age, but retained a similarly aged male, their actions were not sexist.  The seem to feel that either agism is a trump bigotry, or that agism only applies to women? 

In any case, they were found to be ageist. The show moved to prime time and executives clearly decided that age does not go before beauty when they dumped Miriam O'Reilly (53) a 25-year BBC veteran. That decision will cost them something in the range of tens of thousands of dollars.

The Pinup that Went to the Moon

Dede Lind went, in pictorial form, to the moon in 1969. The calendar in question was put in the module as a joke.  Dede made it all the way to the moon and back, and is now on the auction block. Apparently she came down with a bad case of pixelation somewhere along the way.

Crushingly Dull

New Zealand's Next to Model show seems to think it is cool to spoof 'crush' videos (fetish material where women in heels squash small animals to death). In this case all that is getting squashed is a toy animal but this is just the last in a long line of fashion 'edginess'.  It is boring, tawdry and pointless.  Crush is not cool and it is not funny, in any form.

See also:

• New Zealand's Next Top Model Mocks Animal Cruelty Fetish
• Pull New Zealand's Next Top Model Crush Video Commercial

Blonde Bombshell

I like pinups, but there is a time and a place for them.  IMHO, showing a naked pinup holding a bomb to an underage boy is probably not one of them. [link]

Oy.

I realised Tom Ford revitalised Gucci, has a best-selling high fashion brand, blah blah blah.  However his signature look seems to involve nudity, oil and rampant objectification.  All with a nudge and a wink so you can either like it, or like it ironically. You know what? There is another option.

I dearly hope that Santa brought Tom Ford some subtlety for Xmas.

Hiya Yawl

I've noticed a whole lot of new visitors to this blog just over the last week or so.  Nice to see you.  Feel free to say hi, and let me know what kind of stuff you were looking for/like/want more of on the blog :)

Cloacina

Having mentioned Hygieia, I thought it might be worth devoting a few words to Cloacina

Cloacina, Goddess of the tide
whose sable streams beneath the city slide.

[Gay, 1716]

The thing about ancient greek dieties is that they represent and protect anything thing that is important, in its many subtlties. Not just love but love in all its forms pure and lust, gay and straight, sated and unrequited.  And also those basic principles and structures that maintain health cleanliness and sanity.

Thus Cloacina, Goddess of the Sewer. Sometimes seen as a Goddess in her own right and sometimes an aspect of Venus, the Goddess of love and beauty.  A connection that was in no means considered contradictory--not only in that hygene was seen as crucial for health, but that sexuality was seen as part of filth.

Not much, I suppose, has changed.